Akhnaten premiered in Stuttgart in March 1984, but it was the second, Freeman production later that year that made the most headlines. Presented by the New York City, Houston and English National opera companies, it received wide exposure. The casting of the lead role as a countertenor is now almost a commonplace, but then the sound was unfamiliar and unsettling to many. To emphasize further the remove from normality, the probable fact of Akhnaten's hermaphroditism was portrayed by attached breasts. That Akhnaten was a skinhead was unusual for 1984. That his skull was enlarged to match the images of him that survive became a source of easy derision for critics. The Coneheads, famous from “Saturday Night Live” since 1977, became an all-too-handy comparison.

Yet there may have been method to the madness at the time. The shock of Akhnaten then has been conceptualized as a means to force audiences to contemplate how frighteningly different the distant past may actually be from culturally imposed stereotypes. But Freeman's methods would not work today any better than the quasi ad nauseam repetitions in Glass's music. There may still be some strangeness in minimalism, but no shock, then or today. The style is becoming as ordinary as the grist for TV commercials.

Rather than shocking the audience with bizarre physical appearances, Chang tried a more subversive approach. Akhnaten and his cohorts are indistinguishable at the outset from members of the audience. In a neat trick, no one is let into the theater beforehand. The Tour Guide of the libretto works the street and leads patrons into the performance space as if into a tomb through a mock stone tunnel. Among the crowd are members of the cast, clad in tourist regalia.

As the opera progresses, these tourists begin trying on costumes and play acting/singing the roles of history outlined by the Tour Guide at the outset. We are thus eased into a confrontation with an immensely distant, tantalizing but ultimately unknowable past. Critics of the Freeman productions felt the tourist segments were the weakest parts of the opera. Thanks to Chang and her collaborators, the tourists' incongruity with the rest of the opera has been eliminated by the skill in which they are morphed into and out of ancient roles.

If only the music and the sets were up to the same level of effect! A modest budget is no excuse for portraying the building of Akhnaten's city, Akhetaten, as the erection of three dirty ropes. Such provides no indication of the glory that must have been. That the ropes outline a fifteen-foot high, three-sided tetrahedron does a disservice to the four-sided pyramid of ancient preference. (Nevertheless, even these dirty ropes are more effective than the huge sandbox in which Freeman's Akhnaten and family built a nearly invisible group of mud huts to represent his city.)

And the music. There are more than 30 sections, from two to ten minutes in duration. A few of them are beautifully melodic. Several of them have needlessly abrupt transitions. One of them quotes in part Gordon Lightfoot's 1971 “If you could read my mind.” All of them are permeated with subtly modulated, yet numbing, repetition. And nearly all of them are saturated with accents on the first two beats or notes. Perhaps this could be justified as a means of unity, as an evocation of ritualistic incantation.

But is the compulsive accenting a result of Glass watching too many “Batman” reruns on TV? As a satire, the show had a deliberately moronic title song, “BAT MAN …. BAT MAN …. BAT MAN, BAT MAN, BAT MAN…” There is nothing Egyptian about this unwanted reincarnation in Glass's music. More like water torture to me. To others, the majority in the audience, perhaps the now-familiar conventions of minimalism are a balm and a relaxant, an aid for imagining the sand-covered rise and fall of a powerful man and his ideas.

But why watch a prematurely-old-time opera when you can experience the same in a fresh-as-a-daisy movie on the subject? Like “Citizen Kane,” Rosebud-covered yet still going strong after 42 years.